Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Keeping up its acquisition spree, Aegis has emerged as one of the top two players in the Indian domestic market

Aegis is a fascinating story of one of the leading American call centers turning desi. Acquired by the Essar Group in 2003, Aegis, like many others, started by making India an offshore base for supporting its US business but soon realized that the India opportunity was too large to resist.

Apart from building up organically, it bought two of Indias then largest call center companiesCustomer First and Orion Dialoggiving it important footprint in Southern, Eastern (Customer First) and Northern (Orion) India. It has since kept up its acquisition spree acquiring Teletech India (a 50-50 JV of Bharti and Teletech Europe) to emerge as one of the top two players in the Indian domestic market, and today employs more people for its domestic operations than for offshore in India.

Aegis, unlike many others, does not try to position in inbound or outbound space but does what its CEO describes as cradle to grave of customer lifecycle management, addressing customer service, tech support, telesales, and collections. Though telecom does account for 72% of its revenues, like most others, thanks to large customers such as Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea, the share of its new segments is on the rise. In 2007-08, it expects the share of BFSI to go to 15% while it expects to get 5% each from healthcare and retail where it was virtually non-existent last year. The company has a healthy client concentration with about 40% of revenues coming from the top three clients in FY 08.

Realizing that middle level leadership is crucial to the smooth growth of the industry, Aegis has invested on creating a special leadership program called ACE (Achieving Continuous Excellence) that aims at imparting management and soft skills for leaders in the services industry. Led by senior leadership of the company, Aegis believes that these HR initiativestargeted at addressing needs beyond the immediatecan give it crucial edge when this industry is faced with explosive growth.

Aegis Rank 2

Aparup Sengupta, CEO, Aegis

While many domestic call center companies have consciously gone to smaller locations, Aegis has a mix of small and large locations in its India domestic delivery footprint. Of course, it is also planning to expand to small towns.

While acknowledging that some of the issues that face the offshore industry today will become issues for the domestic industry, Aegis believes that the right way of managing attrition is not to try stopping it but as it says, maximizing tenure yield and managing the manpower supply chain more effectively.

The company, which will almost double its manpower this year, expects to grow the revenue by 154% to reach Rs 336 crore in 2007-08. The company believes that growth will come from almost all consumer industries such as healthcare, hospitality, retail, and pharma. Aegis is looking for more acquisitions where it can find value that will give it expertise, geographical presence, or skills rather than only scale.

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9